Our obsession with height

(Part 2)

Two days ago, this column featured some surprising facts about height, and why many peoples of the world, (including Filipinos) are obsessed with being taller, not just in sports, but in politics and other fields requiring public leadership.

Over the last two decades, some countries (most notably China) have had documented cases of surgery to "stretch" clients wanting to be an inch or two taller. This involved breaking the shin bones, and gradually separating them over a period of months, forcing the separated bones to "reach out" to each other. It seems that, even to just get a job as a secretary, many Asians were willing to endure two to three months of being in bed, their legs fitted with painful adjustable braces literally screwed into their shin bones to hold the braces in place as they are ratcheted further and further apart over time.

In the Organization of American Historians, John Komlos writes about a relatively new field called anthropometric history, the study of human physical stature, and the impact of environment. This branch of study started in the 1970’s, when economists wanted to determine the effects of various economic changes on physical attributes of people. One of his theories is that nutrition played a big part, and as of two centuries ago, the diet in North America actually produced taller generations of people than in Europe.

"The stature of slaves indicates that they were well-nourished as young adults, although not as children. Adult slave men reached a height of 67 inches, within one inch of northern-born whites, and above contemporary European norms," says Komlos. "In fact, their physical stature was closer to that of European aristocrats than to European peasants. In spite of their social degradation, blacks born in the New World were consistently taller than their African-born brethren."

Another hypothesis posed by Komlos is that the spread of urbanization has caused people to become shorter. This may explain why today, the citizens of the tiny country of Holland, with its wide open spaces and peace and quiet, are much taller on average than huge numbers of people of the highly urban and suburban United States.

"Until the twentieth century, rural populations were invariably taller than urban ones, and underdeveloped regions tended to have better nourished populations than developed areas," Komlos is quoted as saying. "The Irish, for instance, enjoyed a higher level of nutritional status than the industrial English, and the Hungarians were taller than the Czechs. In America, Southerners were better nourished than Northerners."

In 2004, The New Yorker published a story by Burkhard Bilger called "The Height Gap", in which he detailed the misconception that many peoples — particularly Americans, are getting taller all the time.

"It is wrong, and the misconception has been reinforced by the old evolutionary chart, which shows monkeys growing into apes, growing into Neanderthals, growing into humans – getting taller and sleeker the whole time," Bilger said. "In fact, humans reached an early apex in Northern Europe around 800 A.D., and then they got a lot smaller – down to five feet in the seventeenth century. Europe was in the grip of the Little Ice Age then, and cities were becoming very crowded and disease-ridden."

Bilger also explains that height is a great gauge of how people lived in the past, particularly in places and eras when records weren’t kept, or were destroyed over time.

"Height is a wonderful composite number for a lot of different things going on in the body. It tells you if you had diseases as a child or as an adolescent, because those will stunt your growth. It tells you how good your nutrition was over the course of your first twenty years. It tells you all kinds of things about your general health, and your well-being. By measuring the bones of prehistoric peoples, for instance, you can get a concrete sense of how well they lived. Or you can look at early military records to get a glimpse of peasant populations in seventeenth-century France, which didn’t leave that many written records of what people ate," he elaborates. "You can get a systematic sense of those people’s health as a population."

Bilger also proposes that war and economic growth can actually affect a country’s height as early as within two generations.

"For two centuries, Americans were the tallest people in the world, and by a large margin. We were three inches taller than the average European in the eighteenth century, and we kept our advantage up through the Second World War. Then, in the 1950’s, we suddenly levelled off, while other countries shot up," he adds. "Partly, they were just playing catch-up. The Japanese, in particular, before the war, did not have a diet that was particularly conducive to growth. After the war, the economy improved, they got more milk and other nutritious foods, and now they’re almost as tall as we are. But the mystery is that some of those groups, especially Northern Europeans, have kept on growing, while we haven’t. And now the Dutch are three inches taller than we are, on average."

But is there anything that can make you taller?

The milk lobby promotes the idea that milk is good for you in that respect, and it helps largely in calcium absorption and maintaining strong bones, one of the keys to being tall. But there are also plants and herbs that can help. Vitamins with chlorella growth factor (CGF), for example, like the new product Primovit, without making any therapeutic claims, can be a big help. Pharmaceutical companies don’t really do extensive studies on herbal preparations, though, to pin down a definite positive answer. One reason could be that they don’t really create the product, but merely harvest it. It would serve their interests better to create a whole new product and benefit from patent protection, which would prohibit competitors from registering a similar product within a prescribed number of years. If they did that with products based on medicinal herbs that already exist, they aren’t really creating anything new, and wouldn’t be protected from rivals.

The fascination with height goes way beyond finding potential athletes, and projecting your child’s physical attributes. It also shows how we have allowed modernization to rule our lives, at our own physical peril. Ironically, the most modern, urban societies in the world are literally shrinking. And who wants that?